LECHEROUS LIBRA...

The Awful Ambiguities of November 2006

Tally ho, my idiot disciples of the Scales god! It's noxious November and I have a dose of vile and bitter prognostications, especially for you. Raise the dread cup to your lips and drink, my ghastly things of bottoms and boutiques.

Last time we left, you were set to make your cinematic extravaganza, BLOOD ON THE VALANCE, a drama of betrayal and revenge in the Swedish style, which basically means long silences, meaningful looks and very little action. You had scored the funds for this due to the largesse of a client from you 'fruit healing' days. Thus, you set to work to make your masterpiece!

But what's this? Why it's trouble straight away! Mischievous Mercury moving in perverse reverse puts the wind up ghastly Saturn. Problems with money and the budget begin with a trickle that will soon become a flood. The high quality valances you've ordered for the murder scene that will be the dark heart of this film turn out to be cheap imitations. Why the thread count is a mere seventy when it should have been two hundred at the very least! Eek! Instanter you return them but then enter into vigorous argument on the phone with a 'bed linen' minion. But that's not the end of it!

As a Full Moon comes in leaden Taurus, you have a meeting with your financier, one in which the hidden terms of your financial package are made clear. Fruity healing of the 'special' kind is contractually required to maintain the resiliency of both bank account and backer. Egad! You're going to have to front with fruit to get the dosh! This is all right as far as a mango goes but the unspeakable business with a banana and the strawberries leaves you fatigued and in need of ablutions. But by all the giggling gods, you cannot rest even now! Vamping Venus gropes narcotic Neptune and you turn your attention to casting. The budget isn't vast but you presume the great stars you idolize will be interested on artistic merit alone. But, as mischievous Mercury assails the trident-bearing god, the offers you send to the agents of the famous are mistaken for requests for signed photos. Thus, you must give up on the notion of the 'celebrity' stamp and instead vet your little red book for the lovers you've had that were in the entertainment industry, hoping to score willing workers on the basis of misplaced sentiment. And perhaps your film will bring a great unknown into the public eye, 'great unknown' being a fair description of some of your romantic mismatches.

You begin feeling frustrated and so call a meeting of those involved in the project but you shout at an underling over a minor matter as marauding Mars and mischievous Mercury exchange obscene acts with their rudest bits. However, as vamping Venus conjoins in unseemly fashion with jolly Jupiter, you laugh the incident off as artistic temperament, snorting and chortling in an exaggerated manner until you have a nasty upset involving your nostrils and a skinny cino you're drinking. Everyone looks away but only because they're sniggering! As marauding Mars assaults the nether regions of narcotic Neptune, you throw a tantrum to cover this embarrassment and then pretend you were acting out a scene from the film, one you just extemporized. You're a complex and pretentious being, even at the best of times, my tiny turnips!

Fortunately, at that moment, the costumes are delivered as vamping Venus clatters into silly Sagittarius, distracting you from making any more efforts to cover one humiliation with another even worse one. Armed with garments (a favourite situation), you encourage everyone to try them on and experiment with fake foreign accents. However, as most of those present are foreign, you get an entertaining round of fractured English. But, by all the gods alive and dead, it's in the midst of this delightful mummery that a great horror falls from Heaven into your wretched life. Along with the delivery comes the bill and you realize you have spent so much on costumes, valances and bed linen that there's little left to pay the actors, once your massive fee for writing and direction is siphoned from the company accounts. You make a mental note to do that, first thing in the morning. You weep and wail in your travail as usual but are soon brought to a place of arresting insight, as a New Moon comes in evil Scorpio. Is it not an adage that great art is born out of misery, privation and personal dysfunction? In which case, you are highly qualified for the post. You must be a true artist and triumph through sound economic management.

And what's this? Great masticating monkeys and fornicating camels! An astonishing thing occurs, my little loonies! You're struck by inspiration! You will take your masterwork into the streets and shoot real people living real lives and they shall be actors in your film. It will be highly artistic and you won't have to pay them anything! And, as if in answer to your prayers, the wheels of the cosmos turn to favour this grand design. The great Sol Invicti rolls drunkenly into silly Sagittarius with jolly Jupiter following in hot pursuit, his crapulous bulk shaking Heaven and Earth in the wake of his ghastly passage (eek). You surge into the street, camera poised, looking for anyone that seems vaguely Swedish or blonde or impassively Nordic. Instanter, you're amid the swirl of traffic both perambulatory and vehicular, the grim and dark faces of the crowd resonant with a Northern sense of death and betrayal. You stumble and stagger, with the living eye of the camera in your trembling hands, wearing a blood-soaked valance like a cloak of office!

Odds bodkins! It's all getting quite intense and gloomy, tiny turnips! As marauding clambers upon the aging bones of grim Saturn to do his ghastly business, you collide with an elderly fellow who screams at you in a foreign tongue as he falls to the pavement. So swept up are you in the fervour of artistic fever that you just keep filming, failing entirely to notice the two large and black clad myrmidons that step up to protect their fallen charge!

Egad! This could get serious if you don't take your finger off the button and get on with an apology and some assistance! Will you put aside your art to render aid to a fellow traveller? Or will you put life and limb at risk for that piquant moment of artistic excellence. Click here next time and see, my wretched bottom types! For the nonce, ave!